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Involution, not Revolution

Libertarians have long been accused of not being real “revolutionaries,” of not wanting to stand and fight to effect real political change.

And to this I say, exactly so, we are not revolutionaries in that sense; we do not pursue the overthrow of the existing order by violent and forceful means, we will not pickup arms to fight the state–for that is exactly what they would wish us to do, to give them pretext to destroy us outright. We see quite clearly that the state’s larceny has made it more powerful than any military force in history, more pervasive than any secret police ever were.

“When these revolts succeed, they are called revolutions. But they are revolutions only in the sense that a wheel’s turning is a revolution. An Old World revolution is only a movement around a motionless center; it never breaks out of the circle. Firm in the center is belief in Authority.” – Rose Wilder Lane

And we are voluntarists–even should we win such a war, we could not force our political norms on the population at large.

For this reason we are pursuing a means of change that they cannot object to, a means I call involution, not revolution.

Involution is a rare word with several connotations, meaning mainly, “the shrinkage of an organ in old age or when inactive”–I can hardly think of a better metaphor for what the state has become, an outdated, senescent organ of society, once relied upon, now riddled with cancer, holding back society, draining its health, and our strategy is to shrink it through disuse, to vacate the state, to route around the state and leave it to die without direct political confrontation.

In mathematics the term means an inverse function that cancels out a function, so too do we want to pursue means that cancel out the influence of the state and allow humankind to return to a laissez faire condition, deprive the state of customers by offering competing voluntarist services that are more effectual and cheaper.

Lastly it means, “the process of involving or complicating, or the state of being involved or complicated”–which calls up pleasant images of the organically-complicated processes of decentralized market transactions, with which we will replace the state.

Some of us have despaired from time to time of ever making a real impact on the world with our ideas. How can we ever convince and convict enough people to see real political change even in our own lives and lifetimes?

There is a way, a very good way, both to change the minds of masses of people and to live the change we want to see in the world and help change the entire world. We must recognize the one simple truth about politics and the people that live in this world.

And that truth is that most people simply absorb the cultural and political norms of the society they live in, by osmosis.

We have to realize that the vast majority of people are not going to become libertarians the way most people reading this did. They are not going to read Rothbard, Huemer, and Hoppe. And we do not need them to.

I have a question for you: today, most people are statists, how did they become statists? Was it not by osmosis as well? Is it not because they grew up in a statist system and simply accepted as normal the life and beliefs and expectations society around them presented them with? They did, the vast majority of people simply live out the life they are given without much philosophical questioning of their place in the world.

The good news is that we can take advantage of that same phenomena to change the entire world, and the statists have left us a massive opening to fill by exploiting the world economically and causing people to live poorer than they could otherwise.

In the same way that the Soviet Union was completely demoralized by the time it ended with its failure to produce anywhere near as much economic abundance and prosperity as the United States was producing, despite its former belief that it would “bury you” economically (sorry Khrushchev), we can produce a similar delegitimization of statism on a world-wide basis by showing the world the economic results of an open and consistent ancap society.

It’s easy for us to point to Hong Kong and say here is an example of what happens when you give a people good property rights and a good legal system and a free hand to follow self-interest, this is a libertarian success story, even though it was only marginally libertarian. It’s one of the great success stories in world history and a story that we can repeat world-wide. But how?

Political systems around the world want what happened to Hong Kong and China in the last 20 years to happen to them and their people.

In South America today there is the ZEDE movement, creating semi-autonomous zones designed to attract foreign investment and create jobs, exactly as Hong Kong and Dubai had done for their host nations.

We must begin building ancap enclaves in such places and export this model around the world. And the best way for us to do that is undoubtedly via seasteading. Seasteading allows you to build without being pinned down to a single place and jurisdiction, allows you permanent access to world markets and cheap shipping lanes and avoids messy power struggles with local powers on land.

With seasteading we can create a welcoming immigration policy. Want to join a seastead? Buy a boat and show up. No need for statist passports, TWIC cards, or anything of the sort.

I believe that if we spend a decade investing in seasteading economies at sea that we will be able to attract much of the frustrated 3rd world to seasteads globally. All those people that want to escape their land, to build a better life for themselves, people that would normally wish to emigrate into America–we can bring American-level prosperity and norms to them through seasteading. Wither the American dream? Let us bring forth the earthian dream.

We will brain-drain, talent-drain, youth-drain, and investment-drain the entire world.

And when these people enter our seasteads they will find a condition of decentralized law making things work. We will have long since built voluntarist replacement services of governance that replace what people used government for in the past and make actual government entirely unnecessary.

Amazingly, many people won’t even realize there’s a significant difference. They will still see law, police, and courts, but these will not be monopolized. The biggest difference will be how law works, decentralized law places law in the hands of people, not of politicians and legislatures. We will begin using law to serve people instead of exploiting them.

This will involutionize government control of law.

In the process people will absorb the norms of a libertarian society through use, in other words, by osmosis.

This same process that the statists use today to grand effect to brain wash people into voting for things and doing things against their interest, we can make work for people instead of work against them out of self-interest, by offering simply an option. An option to statism.

The 20th century believed it had discovered how to make societies prosper–by controlling them.

The truth is we know how to make societies prosper, not by controlling them but by setting them free, by involution, not revolution.

Yep, best gif on Liberty.me ever.
I’m very pessimistic about any kind of violent “revolution,” and somewhat less pessimistic about seasteading and other attempts at creating full-blown alternative communities. (I’m somewhat optimistic about conversion by ideas, artwork, and example.)
Admittedly, human societies just can’t achieve perfection, so there will never be some perfect ancap utopia to point to. But nonetheless there can be better and better practical alternatives for people to avail themselves of, and tendrils of freedom have a tendency to extend into even the most rigid totalitarian states (see also, markets in North Korea).

A very nice essay indeed. Of course, I am not wanting to violently overthrow anything, but I am armed, and trained in the use of arms, because I don’t believe the state is prepared to coexist peacefully with others. There is ample evidence of states rounding people up and shoveling them into ovens, gas chambers, and mass graves, sometimes alive. I believe in my freedom to defend myself by means that I choose.

I gather from a friend who is a sometimes correspondent with Patri Friedman that there is less of Patri at Seasteading Institute, but that the group makes progress, has a first project, near shore, and with the permission (!) of a government.

Although I would very much like to see the state rot and fade away, I do not have any optimism that it is going to go through an involution. States are operated by psychotic misanthropes who would rather slaughter people than lose power. The 20th Century was replete with dictators who killed totals reaching into the hundreds of millions as far as researchers like RJ Rummel have detailed. It appears, to me, that the 21st Century is well along the same path. I think we have far more reason to expect a global thermonuclear war than we have to expect the state to fade into irrelevance. Sadly, those who run national governments have frequently shown their willingness to use deadly force without much discrimination, and without apology.

Seasteading on the sea surface, or below the surface, or space settlements on other planetary bodies or within artificial habitats purpose-built for humans and their favourite plants and animals, represent an important concept: the frontier. Frederick Jackson Turner wrote extensively about the importance of the American frontier and the change in many vital aspects of society when it closed. Frontiers are good for freedom, which is why international laws have made it clear that sea-bed mining, sea surface cities, and space settlements are not to be tolerated without the consent of a multi-national (perhaps UN-based) “authority.” So, while it is excellent to see people working on such positive projects, it is clearly an area of activity with built-in opposition from the several nation states that dominate world affairs.

Excellent thought provoking article. Reminds me a lot of Butler Shaffer – “Boundaries of Order”; evolution of stateless society over a period of time by simply relying less and less upon the institutions of the state.

Not sure what is so flawed here that a rebuttal will somehow raze the structure of this thinking, but I am a Reese fan too, so lets see whats got you in a tizzy Matthew. 😉

Exactly right. I’ve been saying for a long time that revolution won’t work. But you do need some form of protection. Nothing creates thieves like unguarded wealth. This is essentially the book, Mosquito Coast by Paul Thorough. Eventually, men with guns will come. This is the essential problem with the seasteading idea. Their guns are bigger than ours. They have the hydrogen bomb, after all.

“Involution” places too much emphasis on the state. What we want most of all is to cultivate civil society and all voluntary institutions. Does that make me a cultivationary?
Other than that, I think I agree with you. Better to show than to tell. Better to compete than to lobby. Better to create innovations that empower ordinary people than to try to struggle directly against the powerful.

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

> To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

That’s exactly what I’m trying to capture with the term.

> What we want most of all is to cultivate civil society and all voluntary institutions.

I didn’t play up this aspect in this post but when I said that the term means to shrivel the state through disuse and that we should “deprive the state of customers by offering competing voluntarist services” I meant exactly what you’re saying here.

Taxes are the lifeblood of the state. Not paying by means of nonviolent resistance and honorable avoidance would seem to be an involutionary strategy of the first order. Every tax we pay strengthens the state and contributes to its longevity. Like all exercises, practicing not paying taxes makes one stronger in resisting, smarter in avoiding and less vulnerable to the sophistry employed by statists to legitimize the immorality of extorting one’s neighbors for their own benefit. In order to obtain anything deemed necessary, which is currently provided by a state monopoly predicated on violence, voluntaryists would depend on persuasion, education, leadership, cooperation and free-market exchange.

> Taxes are the lifeblood of the state. Not paying by means of nonviolent resistance and honorable avoidance would seem to be an involutionary strategy of the first order.

It is, yes, but it is also risky. If you’re going to not pay your taxes, accept up front that they may force jail on you for years. Ala Larken Rose. If there’s one thing the state cannot allow, it’s tax resistance to become a thing. They will punish that harshly.

An alternate form of tax minimization is to live as an expat, where your for $80k in income is tax free, which for most people covers it. Thus seasteading lends itself to this idea, turning us into expats and reducing our tax burden at the same time.

I’d also recommend getting into bitcoin, the ultimate financial opt-out.

I posted this a few days ago in the group Antiwar.com, but I did not get any help, my guess the group is pretty inactive. It is a tangential issue, it refers to the justification of physical violence against state agents in a real situation. I’d like to know what people here think.

Hi guys and gals, i am in Lima, Perú, for a classical-liberal meeting and I just had dinner with a few libertarian friends from Venezuela. The topic of course was what to do to get rid of the Chavista regime, assuming that in the next elections in autumn the regime will recour to massive frauds as it is likely. My default position was that the use of violence is not moral, and I would see emigration as the only viable moral option. I know Block position on secession, and I am aware that even Rothbard considered the American revolution justified, even if, as far as I know, he rejected any suggestion of armed struggles in any other cases, either on moral or tactical grounds.

I still kept my position of not recurring to violence when confronted with the comparison with the revolution in the US, even if arguably the oppression in Venezuela today is worse than in America under the British. I maintained that as far as the option of exit exists, the initiation of violence against, for example, the police thugs that come to your house to put you in jail without any cause is not justified.

Finally they ask me about a situation when the exit option does not really exist, mentioning as an example East Germany before the fall of the wall, or North Korea today.

I was at a loss, I could not really feel I could defend my position any longer. I would love to know what you think

> My default position was that the use of violence is not moral, and I would see emigration as the only viable moral option.

Use of violence to defend yourself is prima fascie moral, it’s just that the state has criminalized certain kinds of defense and will punish you harshly for defending yourself against certain aggressions of the state, and your defense will be cast as terrorism, evil, and used to justify ratcheting up further tyranny.

Secession is far less risky.

> I still kept my position of not recurring to violence when confronted with the comparison with the revolution in the US, even if arguably the oppression in Venezuela today is worse than in America under the British. I maintained that as far as the option of exit exists, the initiation of violence against, for example, the police thugs that come to your house to put you in jail without any cause is not justified.

What you may be feeling is the sense that even those who work for the state are dupes too, are in some sense innocents. The state is not a person, it’s a system, and must be attacked systemically, not personally. This is why many instances of violence against the state accomplish nothing, less than nothing in many cases, because they play into the statist rationale for why a state is needed, to keep peace, to enforce laws.

Therefore the one way to attack the state is to show that the state is *unecessary*–the involutionary strategy.

> Finally they ask me about a situation when the exit option does not really exist, mentioning as an example East Germany before the fall of the wall, or North Korea today. I was at a loss, I could not really feel I could defend my position any longer. I would love to know what you think.

Generally self-defense is ethical regardless, even when the people aggressing –agents of the state–don’t know what they’re doing. But it’s tactically foolish, not likely to work to achieve the desired end. You, of course, don’t have to exercise your right to defense, also for tactical reasons. For this reason, many of us plan on individual secession, yet continue to pay our taxes, even though we equate it to theft.

I’ve seen an argument that while the option to vote freedom back still remains, violence is not completely justified, such as you’re talking about here. I think to some extent that seems reasonable.

East Germany is a great example for how well peaceful demonstrations worked. Demonstrants always remained peaceful, more and more people joined them, they attracted sympathy, because they did not cause chaos and violence. Even officers, presenting the system, who were allowed to shoot them didn’t do so. I should add that we (I was technically born in East Germany, shortly before the wall fell) were extremely lucky too, it could have ended badly. I think it most likely would have ended badly with more supression and more suffering if demonstrants had resorted to violence.

@massimomazzone If you embrace the exit option as a requirement to avoid violence from those attacking you, it seems as if you are dismissing the legitimacy of defensive violence. If this is true, then by extension you have given up on your natural rights to your Life Liberty and PROPERTY. To exit is to grant their claim on what was yours.

This does not mean you have to engage in a hopeless battle against insurmountable odds; but the way you worded it – ” I maintained that as far as the option of exit exists, the initiation of violence against, for example, the police thugs that come to your house to put you in jail without any cause is not justified.” <- Not justified appears to be a denial that people have a natural right to defend themselves. The State itself endorses your "exit" option as a condition of law in many places. You are required to flee if you can. As opposed to the growing list of places challenging this concept with Stand Your Ground Laws.

So if you could clarify when or if at all, you believe violence is justified to defend ones life, liberty and property, I'd appreciate it.

To Ellsworth and Michael.
Thanks for the answer, guys. My question was about morality in real life, and I realize it is a question without easy answers. For example, if someone in the US shoots the IRS agent coming to his house to evict him because he decided not to pay his taxes, I would say that it would not only be foolish, but also immoral. He might be defending his rights to property in theory, but I think it would be an unacceptable over-reaction in practice. I think the same would apply for people organizing armed struggles in today US, for example going around killing cops and politicians. If you do not like the place, I feel the “practical” moral position is simply to sell your assets and move somewhere else. The other extreme is a complete totalitarian environment without any hope, imagine Orwell’s 1984. In that case I think most people would justify recourring to violence, even if without much hope, of course.
The real life is a continuum between those two points. North Korea, for example, is close to the 1984 example. When they asked me the question, I frankly felt that I could not morally condemn someone deciding to organize an armed struggle there.
Cuba today (and Venezuela has a chance to end up like that) is a place somewhere in the middle. For example, if you start to use your supposed right to free expression, you would not only lose hopes of finding a job and you would need to live on the charity of your family or friends, you would also end up in and out of jail for the foreseeable future. But at least today people can leave the country, although at a very high costs, including losing all their assets. In practical terms, for many people the exit is a very remote option, either for the cost of leaving or for the difficulty of finding a place open to receive them. Would you consider that joining an armed insurrection in such a situation would be moral? Statist dupes, as you said, would be killed. Most likely, completely innocent people would also be killed in the cross-fire. Moreover, you would end up with a much better state, but still a state, in the very best case something similar to the US. Personally, as I said in my previous post, I would not consider moral to recour to violence in a case like that. By the way, my position applies also to dangerous defensive practices, like putting metal wires between two poles to defend barricades to be overrun by cops in motorcycles. It seems trivial, but many people actually died because of it in Venezuela last year.
I would like to hear your opinions about where you think the line should be drawn. I realize that libertarianism is not particularly good in dealing with incrementalism, as Block sometimes says, but we live in a real life, not in “life-boat” examples. Outside the US, tens of millions of people ask themselves these questions daily, not as theoretical exercises, but as real decisions to be taken. What do you think?

This article is excellent! Thanks so much.
Seasteading is such a great idea, because it allows us to live in the free society we want without imposing libertarianism on all those people who oppose living in a freer world and who don’t value liberty as much as libertarians do.
If you liberate people who previously didn’t want to be free, you actually did the exact opposite. You “forced them into freedom”, which then obviously isn’t freedom. You can never have a free society with people who are involuntary free, this is a contradiction in itself.
If you need revolutions and violence to achieve your aims, you should seriously question the desirability of your aims. Violence cannot convince people, all it can do is to fear them into toleration. This won’t be a good basis for a truly free society.
Seasteads are able to inspire change on continents, because people may be convinced by examples and arguments.